Posts tagged with “hislope” and “experimental”

Have you seen Terminator Salvation yet? There's a bunch of cool visual effects developed by Imaginary Forces, it shows the world as seen by machines. There's a lot of object tracking going on there, I was thinking whether I could recreate the whole thing just in pure AS3. And, well, here's the result (which I am actually very proud of) ;-)

Click image to activate, wait for the video to buffer (1.6MB) press EDIT button to play with the filters (in full screen mode). Enable your webcam (if you have one) and play about with sliders and checkboxes – try if your face can be tracked too – but then watch for evil Terminators – they'll come and get you! ;-) Btw. you can turn histograms for every filter - thanks to Quasimondo for the code.

This is a part of the whole video filter framework I am developing just now, the inspiration came from Joa Ebert's Image Processing library (as far as I know, he's cooking a complete rewrite). The full source code (including Pixel Bender kernels and examples) will be soon released on Google Code and will feature face/eye tracking/gestures and few other things (surprise!) A lot of people are very sceptic about the whole eye tracking idea, they don't believe it's precise enough to make any use of it – I will prove that it is, and it works! (just watch closely how it tracks my eyeballs on the video!)

My approach is to make everything as much simple as I can. If something cannot be achieved using this rule, I either abandon the idea completely or look for a simpler solution.

The face tracking is actually relatively simple, I will briefly describe each step:

Motion Capture - works the same way as the "movement watchdog" that's implemented in brains of almost all animals (including humans) in order to survive – it finds the rectangle area of the all the differences between two frames. This step could be much more complicated (i.e. I might use face detection or Eugene's motion tracker once he decides to release the source) but simple motion capturing is good enough for Machine Vision experiment here.

Shape Depth Detector – finds centres of colour local maximums, play with the levels slider carefully to get more details – it works by posterising the image then does a very fast blob detection on every result colour – thanks to Kynd and Kampei Baba for sharing this technique.